Valiant have sent round a few press releases this week, each clarifying more detail about their upcoming Unity storyline. Formerly thought to be a major crossover event, then a miniseries, and now revealed as a new ongoing team-up book; the company have also announced a number of variant covers and that the book will be 100% returnable for qualifying retailers.

That’s quite a range of announcements. To the comic itself, firstly: Unity will be written by Matt Kindt, drawn by Doug Braithwaite, and coloured by Brian Reber. An ongoing series which teams Ninjak and The Eternal Warrior with Harbinger characters Livewire and Harada, the book is to launch with pullbox exclusive covers from Brian Hitch, JG Jones, Travel Foreman, Paolo Rivera and Clayton Crain. Those are the covers you’re seeing here, in the order I listed the artists above.

The premise of the book will mean that one book ties-in to Unity: X-O Manowar will be the opponent in the first arc, as the character returns to Earth and looks for somewhere to call his home/sort-of invades Russia. The X-O Manowar ongoing series will therefore set up the storyline within its pages, before handing things across to Kindt and Braithwaite. The four-person Unity team will be formed in order to try and take down X-O Manowar before he causes trouble.

Unity is set to be 100% returnable, something not seen often outside of Marvel/DC/Image. If you’re like me and hear the term ‘returnable’ without ever being entirely sure what it means – returnability means that retailers can in essence sell back their unsold copies of a comic. This means the publisher will usually take a small financial hit, but it also means retailers can be more adventurous in how many copies they order. They can order double the number they might usually order, knowing that the unsold copies go back to Valiant.

So Valiant get more physical copies into stores, and their hope will be that they sell more than usual, even with the unsold copies being refunded. That’s what returnability is! Nobody ever seems to actually say that when they write up news reports, so I had a look into it for us all. Now we can sound 9% more knowledgeable when talking about comics down the pub, hurrah.

What’s a pullbox exclusive cover? No worries, I know that too, now – it’s a cover which can only be bought if you pre-order the series from your retailer. It looks like Hitch’s cover will be a wraparound.

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Comments

unity and unveiled are not alliterative. unity starts with a stressed Y sound which does not occur in unveiled. you could make a case for valiant and unveiled being alliterative tho, so the headline is still all good!

“What’s to keep retailers from ordering cases, then returning them? That seems rather risky.”
I’m no retail expert, but shelf-space is precious and returning anything is a hassle. I suspect a combination of good-faith and self-interest will be enough to keep those wiley (sarcasm) retailers in line.